What Residents Are Working With Today
The Township's official newsletter went dark after September 2024 — with no announcement, no substitute, and no explanation to residents. I raised this gap publicly as a concerned citizen. The newsletter has since resumed, which is a positive step. The underlying problem remains: communication with residents shouldn't require external pressure to maintain. It should be a standing council commitment, not a reaction to criticism.
The Township by-laws page lists some documents but offers no keyword, topic, or date search. Resolutions are buried inside meeting minutes PDFs — to find a specific council decision, a resident must download and read through dozens of documents.
I've already built a working alternative at bylaw.chriswjohnston.ca — covering approximately 188 by-laws and 833 resolutions, searchable by keyword, with AI-generated plain-language summaries. The Township's own site offers none of this. There is still no way to simply search "what did council decide about the landfill?"
The council meetings page is a plain list of PDF links. Residents must download multi-page documents and parse procedural language to find the decisions that affect them. No summaries, no highlights, no email notifications when new documents are posted.
I've built a working alternative at council.chriswjohnston.ca with structured navigation, indexed documents, and links to YouTube livestreams. It updates automatically every two weeks.
The Asset Management Plan, audited financial statements, strategic plan, and energy consumption plan are each a single link to a large PDF. No summary, no key figures, no plain-language explanation of what any of it means for residents. These documents are produced at taxpayer expense — residents deserve to be able to read them.
I Didn't Wait to Be Elected. I Built It.
Every agenda, set of minutes, and agenda package from 2024 to present — organized by year, indexed, and linked to the corresponding Township YouTube livestream where available. A Python scraper runs on GitHub Actions every two weeks, automatically pulling new documents with no manual work.
Every by-law and resolution extracted from meeting minutes and agenda packages — organized by year, searchable by keyword, and enriched with AI-generated plain-language summaries. When a resolution is passed and later rescinded or amended, both appear together so residents can see the full history. The Township's own by-laws page offers none of this.
A daily scraper pulls posts from six local Facebook pages and RSS feeds — the Township of Nipissing, Nipissing Fire Department, Nipissing Recreation, Commanda Community Centre, Nipissing Township Museum, and Commanda General Store Museum — aggregating everything into a single searchable feed with a biweekly email digest for subscribers.
I've Been Raising This for Years
In December 2021, I wrote directly to Kris Croskery-Hodgins, the Municipal Administrator-Clerk-Treasurer, to flag that agenda packages were not being made available to residents ahead of council meetings — making it impossible for residents to prepare meaningful questions or understand what was being decided and why.
The response was immediate and professional: Kris thanked me for bringing the oversight to her attention and committed that it was the Township's intention to publish the agenda package the Monday before each meeting. A simple ask. A straightforward fix.
The entire CAO hiring process — from the February 2021 resignation through to the September 2021 appointment of a Municipal Administrator — had taken place in camera. As a resident trying to understand why the advertised CAO-Clerk role had been quietly restructured and filled without an open process, I had no way to find answers. Every relevant meeting was closed. There was no public record of the reasoning.
In 2022, I filed a complaint with the Ontario Ombudsman — the independent provincial officer who investigates whether Ontario municipalities comply with the open meeting requirements of the Municipal Act. Because I didn't know which specific meeting to challenge, I filed broadly, covering the full series of 2021 closed meetings. The Ombudsman investigated seven meetings.
The Township's official newsletter — the primary way most residents learn about local government — stopped publishing after September 2024 with no announcement, no substitute, and no explanation. As part of this campaign, I documented the gap publicly and advocated for its resumption.
The newsletter has since resumed. That's a genuine improvement. But the fact that it required external pressure to restart underlines the core problem: resident communication at Nipissing Township is treated as optional rather than essential. A communication policy with minimum standards would make this a non-issue regardless of who is on council.
In January 2026, council passed Resolution R2026-09 mandating an electronic card use system at Township landfill sites by April 1, 2026. I learned through a conversation with landfill staff — not through any council communication — that the deadline had been pushed to September.
On March 28, 2026, I wrote formally to the Mayor and all Councillors asking four specific questions: Was the delay confirmed? Why had a three-month project tripled in scope? What lessons from the TownSuite failure were being applied? And why had no formal update returned to a public council meeting?
The staff report presented at the April 7, 2026 meeting revealed what actually happened: a vendor withdrew fees from the Township's bank account unexpectedly, causing a financial disruption. To keep the interim tax bill mailing on schedule, the Municipal Administrator unilaterally decided to purchase paper landfill cards at approximately $150 and defer the electronic system to September. This decision — which directly overrode a council resolution — was communicated to council only as a side note during the March 17 budget presentation, not through a formal motion or resolution.
My letter appears in the April 7 agenda package as Correspondence Item 9. Council's response: they received the staff report, passed a new resolution extending the deadline to September 30, 2026, and asked zero public questions. No councillor asked why staff made a financial and operational decision that overrode a council resolution without a vote. No one asked what the total additional cost was. The pattern from TownSuite — approve, defer, abandon, no public explanation — played out again, in miniature, in real time.